TRDL News and Reviews

TRDL 2012 Series No. 31 – Kitty Pryde

TRDL thom — Fri, 11 May 2012 22:02:50 +0000

TRDL 2012 Series, No. 31 – Kitty Pryde

This was done for the R3 Art Challenge, the subject being Kitty Pryde of the X-Men.

I’ve drawn Kitty Pryde quite a few times, mostly when I was younger. Like many youthful readers of Uncanny X-Men of the day, when Kitty arrived at the mansion, she was my narrative tether to the story, and frankly, not too far off in age from me, such that she was a childhood crush, despite the litany of terrible outfits. This piece started out as a gift sketch to one of my veteran supporters of TRDL and frequent contributor to the R3 Forum and Art Challenges, Deeply Dapper, which I gave him for Xmas in 2011 in ‘con sketch’ format pencils. I decided to take it to complete render for the Kitty Pryde Art Challenge this week, and I’m very pleased with how it came out. As you can see, a Lovecraftian Horror is involved. I think I’m slowly going mad just being around it.

You can find a larger version here.
And as always you can read about some of the design notes in my process pics below.

PS Thanks to Designshard for the parchment stock used, and heavily modified, in this piece under a CC license!

Artists, come join us on R3 and submit to the jams! The R3 Art Challenge offers new characters weekly, but all jams remain open so you can contribute to any that you like, here:
http://www.thirdraildesignlab.com/forum … m.php?f=27
or in the TRDL-R3-WeeklyJam group on DA, here:
http://trdl-r3-weeklyjam.deviantart.com/

:::

Background:

Kitty Pryde, in her model sheet draft prior to her introduction in Uncanny X-Men

Again, thanks to Designshard for the parchment stock used, and heavily modified, in this piece under a CC license!

This was a very challenging piece to put together, as I wasn’t sure how to get the effect I wanted. So, therefore, experimentation!

[img][img]http://www.thirdraildesignlab.com/rimages1202/1kpblue.jpg[/img][/img]
I created a blueline print of the pencil sketch scan, and inked it twice, once for the horror and once for Kitty. Then I brought those in as high-rez color scans, and processed them somewhat for render. The problem, naturally, was that the blueline was too dark. Normally, when using this technique, I push the contrast and brightness on the blueline processing such that I’m left with very light, almost Non-Photo Blue, linework on white background. Here I was working from a grayscale scan of the pencils, so I couldn’t process it that way as the scan was too dark to be effective. So I did a lot of clean-up and tweaking to make each set of inks work.

In fact, I did this twice: you will find, in the process pics below, that all the way through finishing colors on Kitty herself, I was using inks that were choppy from too many artifacts from the scan, so I rescanned and changed how I cleaned the inks up a second time, and overlayed those inks that looked much better on the page, and then did a ton of color touch-up to fit it together.

Ironically, this was all done to give me options for how to present the pass-through of the horror through Kitty’s phasing body. However, as I worked, I was thinking about her power, and realized that all my favorite examples of this being illustrated showed her remaining opaque during the phase. So in the end, I could’ve inked the whole thing once and saved the trouble. I ultimately did allow a faint sense of the tentacles passing through her in her torso, but anyway.

I laid down skin in the render first, as I often do.

After flats, I built up the yellow in the costume.

Shade/shadow, highlights on the black, and the Lovecraftian compendium now rendered. Who is that on the cover I wonder?

Here’s the second set of inks compared to the first, which are still over colors.

The inks are finer and less artifacts here, so this was overlaid, the others removed (all 7 layers of them) and then all the adjustments were done to make the colors work.

Here I was working on the tentacles. I used a pretty complex layering with some layer effects to build these up before smashing the layers down. I was working on a phasing effect that involved the color bleeding out of the linework in Kitty’s torso, but as I mentioned above, that wasn’t ultimately the look i wanted, so I returned to opaques. I also experimented with a slight vibration in the tentacles, like they were out of phase with this dimension, but I didn’t want to introduce that much stark motion in the piece visually.

The build up of the final image was fun. I processed the hell out of the parchment and the overall composition. You may note I also tweaked the hues of Kitty and the tentacles to tie in with the same urgent red tints in the overall piece. I love the vintagey look to it.

Thanks for checking it out!

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TRDL 2012 Series No. 30 – Iron Man XIV

TRDL thom — Thu, 10 May 2012 18:41:22 +0000

TRDL 2012 Series, No. 30 – Iron Man XIV Armor [Mark I]

This was done as part of my ongoing TRDL Iron Man Series, where i attempt to draw every Iron Man armor (and a few other characters from the books) for science.

This is another of the armor designs I never really liked. It appeared after the Silver Centurion armor, which I DID love, though it is a bit dated these days. But from here, we entered the difficult late 80s/all-90s period where I disliked almost everything coming out of mainstream Marvel and DC art-wise and design-wise, and this is no different. The description of the armor was that it was ‘oversized’ and ‘clunky’ yet it owes more to Flashdance than anything else, with the tube boots (leg warmers scrunched down) and slimline body armor (leotard)… I know I’m being harsh. But then he’s got armored underwear, and an armored bare midrif-shoulderpads thing going on. I just never got it, despite the solid art on the book early on. But hey, I resisted the urge to redesign and just went at it.

You can find a larger version here.
And as always you can read about some of the design notes in my process pics below.

:::

Background:

Here’s a sample of the armor design from the books of the day, courtesy of The Iron Man Armory, a go-to resource for the different armor variants. However, I drew mine from memory. This will be apparent below.

Anyone familiar with my work on a regular basis knows I have two small children, and my art time has been limited to conference calls and late nights, often in poor lighting, half asleep, or with a monkey on me. This was one of those pieces that I drew and inked in poor light conditions and had a lot of cleanup to do in PS. No pencil scan this time.

Here’s a shot of the processed inks. Further, a shot of a digital helmet. I decided I wanted him looking to the side. IN SHAME. For the design he developed. Sober. Damn you Stark.

Colors laid out in the flats, just the right tones for IM in my opinion.

Gold rendered to completion. Hm, something’s missing… can’t quite place it…

Red done, same. Something is missing again. What the…

NOW at this point I checked the online refs and discovered what I missed. NECK armor. HA.
Digitally added.

Hm, that foreshortening was bothering me, so I extended the arm and tweaked it a bit.

Oh hell. I forgot the ab strip. Here we are. It’s 1990 all over again!

This is also the first appearance of my new TRDL Iron Man Series background. I’ve decided to build a custom background for each series rather than use the black background of my website. Anyway, I’ll be retrofitting the previous pics in this series accordingly, soon.

Thanks to Webtreats for the schematics brushes used in this template!

Thanks for checking it out!

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TRDL 2012 Series No. 28 – Mixtlicoatl

TRDL thom — Tue, 08 May 2012 16:17:54 +0000

TRDL 2012 Series, No. 28 – Mixtlicoatl

This was done for the 2012 TRDL OC Art Swap, the subject being Mixtlicoatl, an OC designed by R3 Member Tulio. He drew a sketch of El Jefe vs Mixtlicoatl for his side of the swap, in fact. You can see his, and all the TRDL fan art pieces, here. Remember, if you want to join the OC Art Swap, sign up through this link on dA or just let me know and I’ll add you to the queue.

Here is Tulio’s character model

I tried to stay as close as possible to his model sheet. I think I embellished the base of the club a bit and simplified the topknot tube, but that’s about it. This was a fun one. I drew her confident and powerful. She is the arch nemesis to Tulio’s Mixtli character, which we actually absorbed into the TRDL Universe proper.

You can find a larger version here.
And as always you can read about some of the design notes in my process pics below.

:::

Background:

Again, here is the model sheet for Mixtlicoatl as a reference point.

Here’s pencils. I wasn’t sure from the printout of the character I had on hand at the time just what was going on with the right shoulder so I left that blank.

Inks and processing. You can see that I redrew the arm to give it proper extension, so Photoshop would again be my Studio Assistant.

Here’s the arm in place, the club drawn in, the hooks redrawn on the club surface, and the shoulder armor worked out. Ready to go!

Flats done, all in one this time. When I’m mentally unfamiliar with the character I’ll often do all the flats rather than work on skin and then certain colors in groupings. Right out of the gate I could see a challenge: the red used in his design is primary and highlights were going to be a problem. I didn’t want to go into the pinks.

Here’s the skin and face and that confident sneer.

Shade and highlights down. You can see I pushed the red into the oranges for highlights and I think it came out great.

The model sheet shows Mixtlicoatl with jet black hair but I decided to show some body in the dark browns.

Thanks for checking it out!

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2012 R3 Art Challenge No. 17 – Kitty Pryde

admin — Mon, 07 May 2012 22:11:18 +0000

Awesome! This week’s R3 Art Challenge is Kitty Pryde of the X-Men books. Any version throughout the years, or design your own look for her! We’ve had this topic a few years ago (actually 2005), so you can scroll through the earlier challenge here for inspiration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Pryde

*Image, and interesting backstory, from here…

:::

The R3 Challenge is open to all artists and runs weekly but remains open indefinitely. It can be found on the Third Rail Design Lab R3 Forum here: http://thirdraildesignlab.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=27
And on DeviantArt in the TRDL R3 WeeklyJam group here: http://trdl-r3-weeklyjam.deviantart.com/

NEW: A spreadsheet of all R3 Challenge threads to date can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuDrQP27UVZNdEw2WnNWVmlJcHBuaElvUXV0RTAwU1E

Look for the character you want to add and you may find an existing challenge to use…

… Read on for more awesome...

TRDL 2012 Series No. 27 – Titanium Man UPDATED

TRDL thom — Sun, 06 May 2012 14:51:19 +0000

TRDL 2012 Series, No. 27 – Titanium Man

This was done for the R3 Art Challenge, the subject being Russian or Soviet Characters.

I’m working my way through every armored character in the Iron Man world (well, ‘every’ is a term i probably shouldn’t use these days) so since I have previously done Crimson Dynamo (a TRDL Redesign) and the original Black Widow, this time I thought I’d tackle the classic Titanium Man. Even though this design was always very hard for me to parse (and therefore draw) it was one I always responded to, largely because it’s… well… large. Even Boris within was supersized to be a giant for no good reason to drive it. I’ve just always been into that crazy face on the helmet.

UPDATE: I decided to completely redo this piece. The old version (3 days old) is in the process notes.

You can find a larger version here..
And as always you can read about some of the design notes in my process pics below.

:::

Background:

Here’s the original Titanium Man in action.

This is the version I did last week. You know, I base my inspiration for these types of illustrations on the old Marvel Handbooks. Sometimes, I get so focused on doing standing shots suitable to understand the look of a character, I do it at the expense of some of the energy that informs the character itself. My original TM just doesn’t strike me as very interesting, powerful or even massive. So I redid it.

New pencils. Cat feet for scale.

Inks and processing for render

New colors. Darker, more like the old comics.

Shade and highlights. I wanted the light behind him, the center of him facing you being darker, in shadow, making glows punch. I made his palms and his chest knobs glow to reflect the powers he had which weren’t really obvious when looking at him.

Thanks for checking it out!

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R3 Art Challenge 2012 No 16 – Russians

admin — Wed, 02 May 2012 05:31:33 +0000

2012 R3 Art Challenge No.16: Russians

Here’s an interesting one. ‘Russians’.
Certainly there are plenty of Russian, and I’ll technically include Soviet, given the history of recent decades, heroes and villains in comics, but frankly characters from books and film and even historical figures are all fair game! Draw something fun!

:::

NEW: A spreadsheet of all R3 Challenge threads to date can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuDrQP27UVZNdEw2WnNWVmlJcHBuaElvUXV0RTAwU1E

Look for the character you want to add and you may find an existing challenge to use…

… Read on for more awesome...

TRDL 2012 Series No. 26 – Madame Hydra

TRDL thom — Tue, 01 May 2012 18:12:05 +0000

TRDL 2012 Series, No. 26 – Madame Hydra [Viper]

This was done for the R3 Art Challenge, the subject being Madame Hydra.

I have drawn Viper, or Madame Hydra, a few times in the past, the last of which was a compositionally interesting 1:1 with Wolverine, showing her (at the time) new ‘Cobra-ish’ design with the snake motif running up one side of her black leathers. This time, I was inspired to go back to the Viper I knew as a kid (albeit then with short hair in matching green, according to the Marvel Handbooks) using the two-tone green costume, and hair across one side of her face to hide scarring. I threw together a blackened skull with vipers snaking out (yep, 6 for Hydra) as a Mignola-style touch, though I’m not sure how I feel about it now. You can also see the Third Rail Thrills variant below. I’m using a blue wash for the TRT series this year, and this was definitely not one where it went well with the costume colors. That’s why in years past I kept to neutral backgrounds (white, black, sepia)… but what can you do.

The Third Rail Thrills pinup variant, No. 78

You can find a larger version here. and here..
And as always you can read about some of the design notes in my process pics below.

:::

Background:

This is the Viper I recall so fondly from the Marvel Handbooks. There were several other interesting looks for her over the years, but I went back to my youth for this one.

Pencils. Her face looked too hawkish here, to be corrected in inks.

Inks and processed for render…

I started with skin first, as I often do, to get that sorted out. I liked the inks of the face more than the pencils, but would make further edits digitally later.

Shade/shadow over base colors here. I played with several variations on the greens.

Highlights. Kind of funky, those lime boots. I did a version where I added white highlights to the light green stuff to make it shiny but it was even creepier, so I backed off.

This skull and viper business is really random. Hail Hydra, though, etc.

I’m STILL on the fence on the Third Rail Thrills background for 2012 being blue. I was getting tired of sepia and heard from a few folks that there’s ‘nothing sexy about sepia!’ clearly not history students. Anyway, lately I’ve been wondering if all the consistency in the backgrounds was such a good idea. The objective was to have that standardization for the website and the printed work. But it’s easy to doubt it. Right now TRDL Original Characters are on black with a white stroke line and a special crest motif; regular 2012 Series illustrations are on black with a glow behind them, standard crest motif; Third Rail Thrills were gray, then sepia, now blue, custom crest motif again; finally the Wrongrobot’s Rudiments obviously it’s own format. If I want to do propaganda pics or other designs in the layout I use a black bottom border format.
we’ll see. As I get closer to the site relaunch I may make changes.

Thanks for checking it out!

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

TRDL Commercial Project – TVIC Logo

TRDL thom — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 23:15:40 +0000

The Tamalpais Valley Improvement Club is a non-profit group dedicated to preserving land and helping guide the reasonable development of the Tam Valley community, here in Mill Valley at the approach to Mt. Tamalpais. I offered to design them a new logo pro-bono, and this is what came of it. Nice, smooth process, with courteous and articulate responses from my client group along the way as we narrowed choices and came to some conclusions about the direction of the design.

This is the original design. Mountains evoke Mt. Tam, some indigenous pictographics, line art.

One of the members of the TVIC has lived in Tam Valley for longer than most have been alive, pre-dating the suburban landscape we have clustered today between the redwoods and the mountain. After my first round of concept sketches, I was introduced to some imagery that included her home, and decided to draw my inspiration from that. We started with Tam imagery, some egrets (lots of marshland in the valley by the bay’s edge) and so on, but it was mentioned how much the coyotes are a part of Tam Valley going back long before they were considered pests by the residents today. So, I pulled one in for science.

Here’s that classic image of the house, based on her actual property so many decades ago.
I worked up pencil sketches for the house/ logo framework of the valley and Tam beyond, and of a coyote.

Here’s the composite, and the early digital inks. The entire thing was done digitally from the pencil stage on.

Building up the coyote digitally.

Here’s the home and the valley, Tam beyond… working around the new logotype i created.

Obviously you’ve seen the final color version up top. Here’s the line art and then a grayscale version, below. I actually did the line art one to completion, then went in and did the color and grays afterwords. I wanted to make sure a simple line art one would scale successfully, and it does.

The TVIC are thrilled with it, and I think it’s a clean logo that really speaks to the imagery of the valley here and a time gone by.

Thanks for looking!

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

2012 R3 Art Challenge No. 15: Viper (Madame Hydra)

admin — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:15:32 +0000

This week’s selection is a revisiting of a jam we last had in 2005: Viper, from Marvel Comics.
Any version, any action!

More info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viper_(Madame_Hydra)

http://marvel.wikia.com/Ophelia_Sarkissian_(Earth-616)

References galore, as she’s had many looks. Always green hair, scarred right side of the face, and pissed.

References:

http://www.thirdraildesignlab.com/rimages1202/v0.jpeg

http://www.thirdraildesignlab.com/rimages1202/v1.jpeg

http://www.thirdraildesignlab.com/rimages1202/v2.jpeg

http://www.thirdraildesignlab.com/rimages1202/v3.jpeg

http://www.thirdraildesignlab.com/rimages1202/v4.png

http://www.thirdraildesignlab.com/rimages1202/v5.jpeg

http://www.thirdraildesignlab.com/rimages1202/v6.png

http://www.thirdraildesignlab.com/rimages1202/v7.jpeg

http://www.thirdraildesignlab.com/rimages1202/v8.jpeg

http://www.thirdraildesignlab.com/rimages1202/v9.jpeg

… Read on for more awesome...

TRDL 2012 Series No. 25 – Batman [Gotham by Gaslight]

TRDL thom — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 21:17:09 +0000

TRDL 2012 Series, No. 25 – Batman [Gotham by Gaslight]
TRDL Cryptohistorical Redesign

This was done for the R3 Art Challenge, the subject being Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, the first Elseworlds DC story to be published.

The Outcast Studios ‘Daily Sketch Challenge’ featured this character awhile back, so I was inspired to take another pass at redesigning the Batman look for a Victorian era Batman story like Gotham by Gaslight, but with my design sensibilities. Tough to follow Mignola of course. Anyway, my concept is that he wears a harness that serves three functions: it’s strapped to a climbing rope, allows him to hook his victims to it via rudimentary carabiners to hoist them up to the rooftops with him when using his compression-assist grappling hook device, and hides a primitive parachute behind him in case he pitches over the side of something tall. He’s got a set of lenses that drop over his goggles to help him see in low-light or smokey conditions.

This was the piece I sketched for that challenge, using deviantArt’s MURO online drawing tool. The design above isn’t based on this, but it’s a point of reference for how it evolved. It’s basically two steps removed from my thinking about the Gotham by Gaslights version of Batman as published.

You can find a larger version here.
And as always you can read about some of the design notes in my process pics below.

:::

Background:

Here’s Mike Mignola’s awesome design for the character. And, keep in mind the context: period redesigns were virtually unheard of, other than half-biked time travel stories in the 4-color comics of the previous era. Mignola worked out concepts for the entire Batman Universe interwoven into Victorian Gotham, and it was the first self-contained ‘alternate universe’ Elseworlds tale. Hard to imagine how groundbreaking that was, today.

Here’s the pencils for my redesign. Well, my redesign of my redesign fromt he previous challenge. I’d say this wasn’t a Blank Slate Redesign, as it was intended to look more or less like an old timey Batman that a casual reader might be able to identify, but it’s a little more detailed and steampunkish than Mignola’s version, or even my previous pass at it. I know steampunk is a frowned upon word in some quarters. Still works for me.

Inks and then processing for colors. As you can see, I was working at a detail level that disallowed him to have legs at this point.

As this piece would be pretty dark overall, I wanted some of the leather to standout, and his skin to be more saturated and lush, as a focal point.

The colors are washes of cobalt and blue/black, and the leather is pretty warm, like an oil-rubbed hide. I liked the idea that instead of everything being dyed black, he grabbed functional materials to create that harness and the body armor on the torso, perhaps from saddleworks.

For the shade/shadow on dark pics, as you may have seen previously, I drop opacity so I can see what’s going on.

Here’s the main pic finished. Time to leg him up!

First pass at his legs… awkward. I was trying for that 1800s pose you see, with one knee kicked forward a hair, the cocked hip, the feet pointing apart. Looks weird today, but it was especially common in the mid-1800s and into the end of the century. To me, anyway.

Here’s the right pose.

Final legs. Built up all digitally, color first and then outlines.

Thanks for checking it out!

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